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I think most honest people found themselves in the situation as you.

I'm starting to think it's a good thing that American society by and large is ignorant of science issues.

Any time you incentivize scientific research with fame and fortune in popular society, you end up with crap like this.

Let's keep popular acclaim to things which don't matter, such as sports.

You're certainly entitled to be unconvinced and shouldn't be berated for your skepticism. That said...

Honest question: do you have a background in climate science or something similar? I'm a science nut too, but I don't know how I could begin to look at the _data_ involved here and come up with any sort of conclusion at all.

So what I do is advocate for public policy decisions that are in line with the very strong scientific consensus: that human-caused climate change is real and a serious threat to life on the planet.

> I'm a science nut too, but I don't know how I could begin to look at the _data_ involved here and come up with any sort of conclusion at all.

> So what I do is advocate for public policy decisions that are in line with the very strong scientific consensus: that human-caused climate change is real and a serious threat to life on the planet.

You don't know yourself, so you advocate for spending billions of dollars than could be spent doing lots of other important things.

The very strong scientific consensus? I don't see it. I don't see reproducible, falsifiable experiments that can be made by disinterested parties to check climate change. That's what scares me.

Astronomy? I can, and have, checked it myself.

Physics? Friend of mine and girlfriend of mine are physicists; they've tested and re-checked many famous physics experiments for learning purposes as part of their studies.

Microeconomics? Can be tested. Has been tested. I trust it.

Macroeconomics? Skeptical of it, because of it's proneness to confirmation bias, politicization, inability to falsify it, and many historical errors that it's made in the past without even a serious mea culpa from the error-makers. Usually they just add a caveat, or say that whatever proved them wrong actually shows they're correct.

So climate change? I'm not convinced. Reproducible, falsifiable results. Show me - "Here are the average temperatures and temperature variances in 30 regions in the globe this year. We predict the average temperature will rise by X% and variance will rise by Y% in at least 25 of these regions over the next five years. We absolutely don't expect the temperatures or variances to fall in any of these 12 regions most affected; that happening would cast serious doubt on our model."

Something like that - they don't do it. But a bad hurricane season hits? Evidence of climate change. It's hotter than normal somewhere? Evidence of climate change. It's colder than normal? Evidence of climate change. No climate change? Well, hell, it's still evidence of climate change.

> Honest question: do you have a background in climate science or something similar?

Honest answer: A hell of a lot more than Al Gore, and 99.99% of people who strongly, passionately believe that "We need to do something!"

In the climate debate there doesn't seem to be a common "climate agnostic" position yet, perhaps we should put our flags in the ground and define one. After all, you don't need to be an atheist or a theist when it comes to religion, so there's no need to make a claim either way on this stuff either.

Global warming - not exactly sure; climate change, undeniable; human-induced climate change, undoubtedly IMO. We don't need a net global increase to produce catastrophic global climate problems.

British weather reports are becoming dominated by flooding - there are several causes including climate change, poor location of housing, deforestation.

Ignoring climate change based on fossil-fuel emissions we still are running out of fossil fuels and need to find other secondary energy sources. If those sources are renewable then this prevents us having the same problem again in a few years when, say, Uranium reserves are depleted. We should then have an extremely strong impetus to ween ourselves off our current high levels of power consumption and to exploit to the greatest extent we can clean renewable power sources. If we do this then we also are tackling part of the cause of the [potential] greenhouse effect anyway.

If you're in a building and you smell smoke, see it in the corridors, feel warmer; you can assume that the smoke is coming in through a window from another building, or you can pull the fire alarm - there may not be sufficient evidence for either position, but some people it seems want to wait until their clothes catch fire before making their move. It would be too late.

- http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/11/the-coming-ur... current supplies run dry in 2013 unless new fields are found and exploited.

Global warming - not exactly sure; climate change, undeniable; human-induced climate change, undoubtedly IMO

That's the issue. (I upvoted you btw) That the climate is going through a short period of less than stable behaviour is certainly evident. It's also evident that it's gone through such behavior in the past, with both more and less variance. There have been ice ages FFS, and that had nothing to do with man.

It seems like we are having an influence in our current whether patterns, but we simply have nowhere near the amount of data to know this beyond theory.

To say that we are - without doubt - causing the earth's climate to change when we can't predict the "change" accurately is scientifically irresponsible.

There's a lot of confirmation bias I think. Last year the winter around here was colder than usual, and you will not stop hearing people claim it's because of global warming. The next year people continue to use these anecdotes to justify the existence of global warming.

Actually, AFAIK, climate change is supposed to cause greater variability in temperatures, not just uniformly higher temperatures. This is what I've heard from scientists like James Hansen.

Therefore, one would expect more episodes of lower temperature (cold snaps), but also more periods of higher temps (heatwaves).

Fair point. And the thing about climate science is that while you may or may not disagree about global warming, the strategies we would employ to fight global warming are the same strategies we should be employing regardless.

Take the issue of renewable energy. It might prevent global warming, but it also promotes energy independence, reduces pollution generally, allays fears about peak-oil or peak-coal.

Peak-coal? Really? The last I checked there was enough coal in the ground to last several hundred years more, at least. As for oil, there's a pretty damned good chance that our extraction technology will improve (as has been the trend) and our ability to use new sources, like shale, will improve as well (as has been the trend).

Peddling the "fossil fuels will run out, we should find alternatives" line is a dangerous path. It risks a lot of very stubborn people saying "really? well, let's just find out, to the bitter end" and calling that bluff. And there is a very real possibility (even if you are skeptical and put that possibility at, say, 10% or less) that the world ends up using every last drop of coal, and far more oil than we ever thought possible, and ultimately burning 10x, 20x or more fossil fuels than have been burned so far.

There's an optimum amount to fund such research if you are viewing the issue dispassionately, and an amount that you will fund it if everybody is afraid the world will end next year if we don't. To me, it is obvious that the first amount is better. This is one of the few issues where hackers defend intellectual dishonesty as something that makes us do "what we should be doing anyway". I'm sorry, I don't buy it.

Sure, there's a nasty popular undercurrent of slating anyone who expresses doubt. I've experienced it myself. But that shouldn't have a bearing on the facts of a situation.